


Yours More Than Mine

by Arukou



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Kind of sort of a fix-it, M/M, Post-Civil War (Marvel), Post-Spiderman, Pre-Slash, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Tony Stark Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 16:17:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13127292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou/pseuds/Arukou
Summary: Tony called. Steve was ready for an alien invasion, but he wasn't ready for a broken Tony.





	Yours More Than Mine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JovialHarp5159](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JovialHarp5159/gifts).



> For [JovialHarp5159](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JovialHarp5159/pseuds/JovialHarp5159) for the tumblr Stony Secret Santa. They asked for angst with a happy ending. I hope this is to your taste and Happy Holidays!
> 
> This fic takes place immediately after Peter's final confrontation with the Vulture, but ignores the last ten minutes of that film. That means that Civil War has happened.
> 
> I _have not_ seen the Infinity War trailer and I ask that you not spoil it for me or compare this fic to events that have been depicted in the trailer. I'm trying to go into that film with as fresh an eye as I can.

The call came at ten in the morning, right in the middle of Steve’s standard workout, which meant that the phone was over in his bag. It took two rings for him to tear across the gym, leaping over boxing ropes and stray weights as he went. “Tony? Tony! What’s wrong?”

On the other end was silence.

One breath.

Two.

Steve’s chest heaved as he tried to think, tried to plan before he even had the semblance of a sit-rep. Still nothing happened. Steve tried again. “Tony? Tony, can you speak to me? Can you make a noise? A clap? Anything?” An edge of panic crept in as Steve’s mind raced. Emergencies only. What could be so bad that Tony would swallow his pride and call?

“This was a stupid idea.” Through the crackle of distance and static, Steve could barely hear the words, and then the line went dead. He stood like that, phone to his ear, sweat trickling down his back, the late morning sun beating down on him from the skylight above, the air around him still save the hum of air conditioning. Rage suffused him. He ripped the phone from his ear just long enough to hit redial and then waited as the other end rang and rang. It never switched to voicemail—probably Tony hadn’t even set one up—and as seconds turned to minutes, Steve’s burning hot anger settled into something steadier, a beat that throbbed in time with the blood in his veins. At 4 minutes, 53 seconds, Tony picked up.

“What the fuck, Tony?”

“Forget it, Cap. It’s late. This was a mistake.”

“Don’t you dare hang up on me. What the fuck?” Steve’s tone sank lower and lower, a hissing growl in the register he hated hearing in his own ears. He never meant to be angry, but somehow he always wound up there.

“Leave it, Cap.”

“You’re the one who called me. On the phone I sent you explicitly for emergencies. When it rings, I expect an emergency, so don’t tell me to ‘leave it.’” The words were harsh on his tongue, and his teeth felt too sharp as they clicked down on the “t.” No. He never meant to be angry.

“Yeah. Great plan, that. You’re what? An ocean away at least. What did you think you were gonna do if I did call with an emergency? Just saunter on over to New York in five minutes?”

Steve swallowed his reply, because he had also wondered what good it would do, what good he could do, when he couldn’t even legally enter the US without being arrested.

“That’s what I thought,” Tony snapped, or tried to. Even through a shitty cell connection, Steve could tell that Tony was tired, exhausted, and whatever bite he’d meant to have didn’t quite translate. Steve checked the clock. Ten hours ahead of the US meant it was midnight there. Sucking the anger down, Steve took a steadying breath, hating the way it rattled through his trachea on the way down and back up again.

“If it wasn’t an emergency, why did you call?”

“Oh, you know. Just thought I’d shoot the shit.”

“Tony.” Steve shouldn’t have been surprised. Why would he expect sincerity when the last thing he’d ever done to Tony was the worst thing he could’ve done to Tony? Why now would Tony express even the tiniest weakness when he had no reason to expect kindness or empathy or trust or any of the things Steve should’ve offered as a friend. All the same, the automatic deflection to sarcasm rankled him, and he could feel his teeth gritting, his free hand curling into a tight fist.

“It’s just…who the fuck else do I ask about this? Do you have any idea how incredibly tiny our little broken super-club is? How few of us are out there? Who am I gonna ask? That crazy dude in Hell’s Kitchen? The bulletproof guy in Harlem? They don’t even know me, and I don’t know them, and there’s a damn good chance they don’t want anything to do with me either.”

“Tony, what is this about?”

He expected more deflection, more sarcasm, more walls and no answers. He expected Tony to spin until his wheels were smoking and then hang up the phone, leaving Steve to wonder if it hadn’t all just been a fever dream. What he didn’t expect was a few more beats of silence followed by a gasp on the other end.

“Oh god, Steve, I fucked up.”

Not a gasp. A sob.

All of the anger washed out of him in an instant. Steve had seen Tony sustain terrible injuries—broken bones, a punctured lung, debilitating blood loss, a concussion, dislocations—and he had suffered it all without a tear. Even…even Siberia. Even there Tony hadn’t cried. He was not a man who cried in front of other people, and sometimes, in his less charitable moments, Steve had wondered if Tony was a man who was capable of crying at all. But the choked sounds on the other end could only be sobs.

“Tony,” Steve said softly. He barely registered that he’d moved until his back hit the wall, and slowly he slid down, curling his knees in and propping his free elbow up. The stone against his back was cool, and it sent a shock through his soaked shirt. “Tony, tell me what’s wrong.”

“The kid… the kid… I…”

Steve didn’t say anything, but in his mind, there was already a panic. “The kid.” Which kid? A child? Had there been an accident? Steve wracked his brain, trying to remember Tony’s roster of relatives. Could it be a cousin?

“I can’t do this, Steve.” Tony continued, and Steve’s spine went rigid with shock and fear.

“Do what, Tony?”

“Be you! I can’t be you! I can’t… I don’t know what I’m… oh god, I’ve just… I fucked him up completely, you know…” Tony’s crying worsened, and Steve listened helplessly as his sobs crackled across the line, loud and panicked. There were things you were supposed to do in this situation, ways you were supposed to talk to people, but hell if Steve could remember a damned one of them, and Tony was getting worse. It sounded like he was choking on the other end. Breathing. Steve could do that at least.

“Hey, Tony? Tony, can you listen to me? Let’s, let’s just breathe together, all right? You and me. I’m gonna count my breaths, Tony, and you just, you just try and do that with me, okay?” Steve started up the rhythm, inhaling and exhaling through his mouth as loudly as he could, giving Tony a steady beat of four in and four out with a little pause in between. For a while, it seemed like Steve wasn’t doing any good at all, but eventually Tony’s crying started dying away, and though Steve couldn’t hear his breathing, he was somehow sure that they were in sync. “Okay. How are you feeling?” he ventured.

A scoff, a bit of soft self-flagellation. “Peachy,” Tony murmured, and Steve could just picture him, perched on a desk or slumped in a chair, spine curved, head bowed, hand over his face.

“Now, can you tell me what kid you’re talking about?”

Tony sighed, and again the image played out in Steve’s mind—Tony tipping his head back, exposing his throat, staring up at the ceiling. “Spider-kid. You met him. Or rather, you wiped the floor with him.”

It was a flash in Steve’s mind, red and blue, fast, surprisingly strong for such a slim, small body. He’d been an okay kid, enough so that Steve chuckled without meaning to. “I don’t know if I’d say ‘wiped the floor—‘”

“You could’ve wiped the floor with him. If you’d wanted to.” _The way you did with me_ , hung unspoken in the air, and Steve shifted a little, suddenly uncomfortable.

“So what about him? Is he hurt? Is he…?”

“He’s not dead, no thanks to me. It was a near thing. He…there was a weapons dealer. It was…it was bad, Steve. It didn’t make the news in your not-so-secret location?”

“I, uh, I’ve kinda been taking a break from the news. It’s...” He didn’t know how to articulate to Tony how uncomfortable it made him to hear them all vilified in the news whenever there was a slow week. If it were just Steve, he could have dealt with it, but the way they tore into Sam or Wanda or Bucky or Vision or Tony or Natasha, especially Natasha, made him sick. They never picked a side either—all meta-humans were fair game, and as far as the commentators were concerned, they were all evil.

“I was trying…” Tony took a huge gulping breath, and the sound of it tore at Steve, even through the crackle of a piss-poor connection. “He can’t, he can’t just be running around New York unsupervised. He’s a kid! A fucking kid, so I just thought, you know, look out for him, keep tabs on him, but I’ve been moving my tech upstate, and the FDA is blocking us on this initiative I’ve got, and I just, he just fell through the cracks. I let him fall through the cracks.”

“But you said he’s okay.”

“No thanks to me! He cracked the code on his suit, and I didn’t even notice! Then he tried to take on a gig he wasn’t ready for, and a whole boat full of civilians just…” Another chocked sob. Steve hated himself in that moment, hated that he was so far away where he did no good to anyone, least of all Tony.

“Casualties?” Steve’s voice was soft, hesitant, but it still had that ring of _Captain_ in it, and Tony scoffed.

“It’s a miracle, but no.”

Steve released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and slumped against the wall, abruptly exhausted. He was always exhausted these days, it seemed like. “So…what do you need, Tony? Why call me?”

“Because you trained the whole damn team? Because I need help? Because I don’t know what I’m doing, Steve. You just fucked off to wherever and left me to deal with this mess—“

“Don’t put all this on me—“

“—and Ross is on my ass every five seconds, and we’re so understaffed it’s a wonder—“

“—because you were right there with me—“

“—that I even managed to get a suit made for the kid—“

“—and it takes two to tango, Tony.”

“—now that we’ve got all this Inhuman shit going on.”

The line went quiet on both sides for a long stretch of breaths, and then abruptly they both broke into laughter together, weak wavering huffs that barely constituted the word “laugh,” but it made Steve’s bones feel like Jello. He wanted to collapse on his side and curl around the phone, just hold onto the sound of Tony and him and what little sense of familiarity there was left in his life.

“You said you can’t be me.” Steve had meant to make it a question, but the hushed whisper came out decisively, damningly.

“Steve, do you realize I was already working two full-time jobs before you broke up the band? Do you realize that on a day-to-day basis, I’m in charge of R&D for my entire company, and on top of that I save the world on a regular basis? You guys, you were all full-time Avengers. You spent your days training, assessing tactical threats, planning missions. And that’s a full-time job all on its own, and now it’s on my plate too.”

“But you’ve got—“

“Who? Who’ve I got? Tell me, Steve.”

Steve’s breath froze in his lungs, and for a moment it was like being seized with an asthma attack all over again. Because this was a thing he’d spent months trying not to think about. Tony rambling around the compound with a socially inept android and Rhodes, who could act in support capacity only. Steve had told himself it was all right, that it would be fine, because when trouble came, the other Avengers would answer anyway. He’d rally them, and they’d fly in, and everything would be fine. But he was also aware, in a dark corner of his mind, that his platitudes were stupidly naïve.

“That’s what I thought,” Tony sneered through the line, and Steve shuddered. “You know what really got me? That letter you sent. ‘We all need family. The Avengers are yours. Maybe more so than mine.’ Well if that’s fucking true, Steve, why did they all choose you? Why did they choose you?” And oh god, Tony was crying again. The impotence Steve felt in the face of Tony’s pain was crushing, and he curled more tightly around the phone, wildly imagining scenarios in which he stole a jet and flew back to New York. Because he didn’t have an answer for Tony. He didn’t understand it himself. He’d expected…he didn’t know what he’d expected.

In hindsight it should’ve been obvious. Sam had never been loyal to the Avengers as a concept, only to Steve himself. Wanda, for all the rough edges at the beginning, had somehow wound up looking to him as a mentor. Maybe she’d never really forgiven Tony. Clint was supposed to have been retired, and yet when Steve called, he’d been game. Why? Why did they trust him? Why had Tony trusted him?

On the other end of the line, Tony sighed, the sigh of the dead and dying, like all of his energy was slipping out through his lips. “I know I fucked up with the Accords, Steve. I should’ve…I knew…but it’s done now. And we have to deal with the consequences. _I_ have to deal with the consequences. And the kid, he’s, he’s a kid. What do I do with him? He wants to be a hero, and he has this power, he’s so strong, but I just… Should I take him on as a full-time Avenger? He’s not even eighteen yet.”

In his mind’s eye, Steve pulled up the skinny little blur of red and blue again, saw how he moved and twisted. “He’s okay?”

“For what value of okay? He got the shit beat out of him. I…I really thought he was…”

“He’s okay, Tony. Now we deal with it.” Problem-solving. Logistics. Steve had always excelled at that, even before the serum. 4F on the army write-up? Well, he’d found a way hadn’t he? Five bucks short on rent? He’d had a plan there, too, way back when. “He’s in the hospital?”

“Stark Tower med-bay. His identity’s secret. I can’t have it compromised. People would come after him.”

“Okay. That’s good. What’s Vis up to?”

Tony blustered and sputtered, and after a moment, Steve realized it was a choked laugh. “Oh, you know. Just sitting around the compound staring at the walls. There’s no training schedule now, you know? Not enough people to train.”

Steve ignored the sting that bit into his heart. “The kid said he’s in Queens, right? Well, have Vis go down and start training him. The Tower’s still got equipment, right?”

“I sold the Tower.”

That was a different kind of pain, one Steve had not expected, one which felt a little like being sucker-punched. It had been their home for a while, all of them. They’d lived there, trained, laughed, strategized. After SHIELD fell, before the whole Ultron debacle, that might’ve been the closest he’d felt to family in a long time. And now it was gone, sold, and he hadn’t even known.

“Oh. Uh.” He blinked rapidly, tried to reorient his focus. “Is there somewhere else? A property or a warehouse or something? If Vis has spare time, he should… It’s probably not good for him to just be spinning his wheels. If he goes down and starts training the kid, that kills two birds with one stone, right? Vis starts getting back on track, and the kid gets some training that’s not out on the streets where he might get hurt. And then Vis can report to you, tell you how things are going. I know…I know you don’t have a lot of Avengers right now, Tony, but you should use the ones you do have.”

Tony took another deep shuddering breath, and Steve could almost see him, sitting there, slumped against a wall in his shop clothes, too many layers of shirts, like he was always cold, a glass of something strong in one hand, a posture of defeat. Steve painted the whole grand picture in his mind’s eye, the jagged black shadow of the trees around the compound, like a phantom mountain range, something out of a nightmare, and the endless sky above, with its distant cold stars. It was hideously lonely.

“Do you think…” Tony started, and then he paused, and Steve held his breath into the silence, waiting, wanting to help and not knowing how, and still, in a quiet little corner of his heart, so very angry at all of it.

“Did we ever really trust each other?”

Steve feels the weight of that little “we.” It doesn’t specify a number. Did Tony mean “we” the Avengers, or did he mean “we” just Steve and Tony, or did he somehow mean both at the same time? Steve thought back on the years they were all together: Bruce sequestered in the bio lab, emerging to swab for DNA or to have Tony check an equation before retreating again; Nat and Clint running off on little side missions which Steve suspected were on Fury’s orders, never mind that SHEILD was disbanded; Sam off doing Steve’s detective work for him while Steve monitored HYDRA activity and tried not to pace circles into the Tower floor; Thor off with Jane most of the time, doing god only knew what. And Tony, in his lab, in Bruce’s lab, in command headquarters, in his SI offices, at Steve’s side running intel, spinning, spinning, spinning never stopping. “I guess maybe we didn’t,” Steve finally said, the burn of Tony’s betrayal, of Steve’s own, sharp and acidic in his throat.

Impulsively, stupidly, he blurts, “Come to Wakanda.”

Tony’s derisive snort is loud and wet. “And do what? T’Challa will shoot me down the second I hit Wakandan airspace.”

“Not if you’re here for business. SI. The Accords. There must be something you could come up with.”

“Sure. I’ll just fabricate a global crisis or a multi-million dollar vibranium deal. Ross’ll definitely be thrilled with my just waltzing off somewhere on superhero business without committee approval. Or better yet, he’ll be even more thrilled if I come back with no vibranium so he can slap me in cuffs for lying to the oversight committee about my business.”

Steve swallowed heavily around the sudden golf ball in his throat. That sounded even worse than he’d expected when he first read the Accords; it sounded like Tony was caged like a dog. He hated that thought, as he hated it when he pictured any of his team behind bars, but it seemed cruelest to Tony, who’d built his own wings to escape cages before and now found himself tethered not by captors but by a cage of his own making.

The bright sun beat down on Steve’s head, made sweat run at his brow and the back of his neck. He took a breath to say something, to suggest something, but he could think of nothing to say. Not a damn thing. The silence went on so long that he wondered if Tony had hung up, but then Tony spoke: “Why?”

“What?”

“Why do you want me to come to Wakanda?”

Steve didn’t know. Well. That wasn’t true. He did know, but his real reasons were the kind he kept buried under seventy years of ice, the kind he tucked down and buried deep, because if he looked at them for too long, everything would fall apart. But then again, wasn’t that how they’d gotten into this mess in the first place? Not trusting each other? Maybe…

Words had never been Steve Rogers’ forte when it came to anything but heroic speeches. Dredging them up for someone he loved, expressing affection or fondness, it didn’t come naturally to him at all. He’d asked Peggy if she and Howard fondued for fuck’s sake. when he tried to pull up the words, it was like wrestling a thousand Chitauri all over again, each syllable bumping, jarring, clawing, as it worked its way up from the icy pit of his gut. “Because…because I miss you.”

He’d spoken the words so softly, so brokenly, that he wasn’t sure if Tony had heard him at all, but then there was another derisive snort on the other end of the line. “It’s not that fucking easy, Rogers.”

When silence followed this time, Steve knew he was alone.

* * *

 

Steve assumed that would be the last he would ever hear of Tony, but it was like he’d pulled his finger from a dam and everything came flooding out. Now that he’d said it, it was all he could think about. He started watching the news again, reading the reputable journalists. (And sometimes the disreputable ones as well. Sam caught him at it once, shook his head, and said, “Man, you never learn.”) A lot of the news wasn’t even about superheroes anymore. The world had moved on to the next major crisis, and the next after that. The corporate media moguls pushed out their churning empires and the world consumed ravenously. When Tony was in the news, more often than not the stories came down against him. “Iron Man Called into Sixth Congressional Hearing.” “Can We Trust One Percenter Tony Stark?” “If Cap Couldn’t Back Him, Neither Should We.” “One-hundred Sixty-Five Dead in Freak Airplane Accident: Where were our Superheroes?” “Massive Blob Eats Missouri: What Good are Superheroes?” There were a few New York area pieces about the kid, Spiderman, but it seemed Tony had done _something_ , because mostly he kept himself out of the news.

Three weeks later, the phone rang again. Four in the morning New York Time, two in the afternoon his. He was reading in his quarters, books T’Challa had supplied on American imperialism. It was eye-opening, to say the least. He had the phone to his ear practically before it quit ringing.

“’You miss me?’” A different Tony today, then. An angry one, and one Steve suspected was drunk. “You fucking miss me?! You don’t get to miss me, Rogers. What the fuck gives you the right to miss me?”

“Nothing.”

There was a momentary pause, and then Tony barreled on. “You’re fucking right. Nothing gives you the right. You hate me. You’re not allowed to hate me and miss me at the same time.”

“I don’t hate you, Tony.” Steve did hate how small his voice was, though, how wounded. This was why he didn’t say things. Because it hurt.

“You sure as hell fooled me. You…you just go off to God-knows-where and you, you lie. About my parents! And then you…you…” No. Steve’s initial assessment was wrong. This was still crying Tony. Crying, angry Tony. Steve never meant for any of this to happen, never meant for…

“Why didn’t you just finish it?” Tony asked and then hung up the phone.

* * *

 

Steve spent the rest of his day alternating between decimated punching bags and blank staring contests with the wall. He didn’t expect another call, but one came, only eight hours later.

“You don’t hate me.” The way Tony said it, it was half question, half statement.

“I don’t. You make me furious sometimes—“

“Just sometimes?”

“—but anger and hate aren’t the same thing, Tony.”

Tony sighed into the line, and the crackle of it was like static electricity, like a phantom breath raising the hairs on the back of Steve’s neck. He had the suspicion that Tony still didn’t believe him, and he didn’t know how to change Tony’s mind. Wasn’t that always the problem? That they didn’t know how to talk to each other? Or maybe that had never been the problem. Maybe their problem had been something else entirely, some looming feeling that was too big to put into words.

“If…” another shuddering sigh. “If I could get you a pardon, would you come back?”

The very thought of it sent Steve’s mind spinning down a vortex, curling tighter and tighter in on itself, crushing him. He hadn’t even imagined… In a distant part of his mind, he scoffed at himself. Some fucking master tactician. He’d just had a vague idea in his mind that some threat would come along, and he and the rest of the exiled team would show up when the world needed them, and everyone would just shrug, and say forgive and forget. As if it would be so easy. “Is that even possible?”

“There would be stipulations. You know there’d have to be. You broke the law, even if it’s a law you don’t agree with. But I…I presented evidence. To Congress and to the UN. About Zemo. Made Ross so mad he was red in the face, but I showed them all how you’d been coerced into all this, and then I pointed to all the clauses in the Accords that had made you hesitate. You’re still Captain America, Steve. That name has a lot of weight with a whole lot of people.”

“I’m not Captain America anymore.”

“You may’ve dropped the shield, but that’s not what makes you Captain America. It’s just a shield, Steve.”

“Is the suit just a suit?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

Steve knew that was true, even before he’d asked. He knew you could drop Tony in a desert and he’d fly himself out in a sand jet forty-eight hours later. It wasn’t the suit that made him Iron Man, though Steve was generally in favor of armor that protected his teammates. Why had he even asked in the first place?

“So would you come back?” Tony prodded again.

“Is there something for me to come back to?”

Another thing Steve hadn’t really meant to say. It was unfair to ask this of Tony, to ask for the same emotional rawness that Steve had shown, but he couldn’t help it. He wasn’t sure there was much of a point in going back if he didn’t have something to come back to.

“There’s the team. It’d be full pardons across the board. Even for Barnes. Although we’ll have to do a lot of work for him. To protect him. I can’t begin to tell you how badly the intelligence community wants him, and you can guess why.”

“Just the team?”

“What more do you want, Steve, a goddamned picket fence?”

“Tony, you know what I’m asking. …Don’t you?”

“I actually don’t. But I will tell you, I’d do anything to just…”

“Tony, I’m telling you I _miss you!_ ”

“And I’m telling you I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means… it means…” Steve was dangerously close to crying, and the pressure inside his chest was so great he felt like it might just split his ribcage in two, leave his heart raw and exposed for all to see. “It means it’s not just that I don’t hate you. I…I think I might…Or that I could…if we’d just had a chance…if we’d trusted each other…”

The silence on the other end weighed on him like the Earth on Atlas, crushing him down, widening the cracks inside him. He was crying now, the tears hot on his face, his teeth bared, wanting to say more but not knowing how.

“Are you…are you…?” Tony never finished the thought. The line went dead. In the dark of his quarters, Steve slumped to the ground, hating himself, wanting Tony, hating the Accords, furious that they hadn’t all been better than this, mourning for something that never was, and all of it crushing crushing crushing until the tears flowed hot on his face, and his body jumped with silent sobs.

Time became meaningless for him as the pressure released, as it all streamed out. Maybe he’d been meant to break. Maybe his wounds had healed over while they were still sick and he’d never drained the pus. Maybe this was the only way for Steve to move forward. But it hurt so fucking much.

Though time was meaningless for Steve, it wasn’t meaningless elsewhere, because fifty-six minutes after Tony’s call, the phone rang again. At first Steve, blinded by tears and overwhelmed, didn’t realize it was ringing, but then he felt it vibrate against his hand, and the sensation jogged him. “Hello? Hello?”

“Steve? God, you sound terrible. It’s done.”

“Done?” Covered in tears and snot, head pounding from sobbing, Steve couldn’t quite understand.

“Done. The pardons have been issued. I’m coming to bring you home. Tell T’Challa so he doesn’t shoot me out of the sky.”

“You’re coming?”

“You heard me.”

“Here?”

“Steve, I…” Tony’s tone hinted that a whip-smart wisecrack was on the way, but he never finished it. He took a big shuddering breath and said, “I can’t take back what happened. But I want to make it better. I want to make it right. And I can’t do it alone. We have hearings scheduled with the UN on Monday, and all of us have several hundred papers to comb through with my team of very expensive lawyers between now and then. And then…then maybe we can make a chance. You and me. We can learn to trust each other.”

“You want that?”

“I want that, Steve.”

Steve’s smile hurt almost as much as the tears. He’d forgotten what it was like to feel hope, forgotten that hope could be just as painful as sadness, but it was a different kind of pain, the kind that felt like healing. He sniffled, wiped ineffectually at his face, and gathered himself, carefully shaping himself into Captain America.

“I’ll get the team assembled. I should warn you, Buck’s on ice. We’ll have to plug him in. And I don’t know where Nat is.”

“Well, we’ll have to work on that. In the meantime, I’ll see you all in two-and-a-half hours.”

“Two-and-a-half hours. Roger.”

“It’s a date.”

“Is it?”

“Well. It’s something.”

Steve could hear the half-smile in Tony’s voice, that shy boyish thing he almost never showed anyone. “Yeah. It is. It’s a beginning.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/) for more fanfic and nerdery.


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